Back in April (HERE), we wrote a piece on housing in the US. Eight months later, we thought it was important to provide an update. To rewind the clock for a moment, in late April the 10-year treasury was yielding 2.87% and the 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 5.27%. At the time, existing home sales […]
Housing, the American Dream, captures headlines during good economic times and bad. This of course is for good reason. For most Americans their home is their single largest asset and the biggest purchase they will make in their lives. It’s also the easiest asset to borrow against and most buyers use a lot of leverage […]
Several of our clients and our partners have encouraged us to increase the frequency at which we post thoughts and ideas to our website. At a recent offsite, we agreed we should make that a priority for 2022. Consider this an early new year’s resolution and thank you for your feedback. One of the most […]
To our Valued Clients and Friends, We here at Custos hope you and your loved ones had a Merry Christmas and a very happy holiday season. This year, perhaps more than most, we are thankful for your trust and friendship. This post is both a bit of a “year in review” and a look to […]
With the first, and possibly the last, presidential debate in the rearview mirror and less than three weeks until election day, we have been working diligently on ensuring portfolios are properly positioned going into election day. As a team, we discussed the four possible outcomes and how the market might react. Below we will briefly […]
Twenty-three trading days spanning the end of February and most of March is all it took to wipe out three years’ worth of equity market gains. To say the period we just went through was the most dramatic of our collective careers would not be an overstatement – even the ’87 selloff was not as […]
With Christmas and New Year’s falling on Wednesdays, the calendar has afforded us more time to reflect on 2019. The decade ended with a bang – 2019 was the single best year in the past ten years for the MSCI All Country World index and the S&P 500 missed sharing the same status by less […]
Rarely in markets can we be completely certain of what is causing them to move. The industry joke is, “more sellers than buyers,” when equity markets head lower. We find ourselves in one of those rare moments where there is no question around what is causing the current selloff. First, a timeline: On July 31st, […]
Q1 2019 Recap What a difference a quarter makes. Q1 2019 ended with global markets up sharply against the backdrop of weakening global growth. The first three months of the year registered the best quarterly return for the S&P 500 in over nine years. We have to go back to Q2 and Q3 of 2009, […]
It feels strange to start this post with a New Year salutation as we are now officially three weeks into 2019. For a variety of reasons, we held off on an update until now. We were hoping to see a resolution to both the ongoing trade talks with China and the government shutdown. Neither has […]